China's worries go beyond Taiwan drama to fear of U.S.

BEIJING - The drama being played out over the Taiwan Strait isn't just about Taiwan and China.

While threatening Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui with "doom," Beijing is voicing ever louder suspicions of U.S. ambitions to contain China, in collusion with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The message: China, the rising regional power, will stop what it claims is Washington's attempt to shift its "gunboat diplomacy" from Kosovo to East Asia.

"America and Japan are sharpening their swords," the military newspaper People's Liberation Army Daily said in a commentary this week. "They're holding war games. They're raising troop levels. The new U.S. interventionism is showing up in Asia."

A map accompanying the two-page report showed recent military exercises by the United States, Japan and other countries in the region.

Beijing is especially alarmed about the NATO campaign in Kosovo, afraid that it could set a precedent for intervening in Asia, particularly over Taiwan.

Recent announcements that China developed a neutron bomb and tested a new missile were warnings meant as much for Washington as for Taiwan.

A senior U.S. military commander warned in unusually blunt language this week that China will have to contend with the U.S. Navy if it tries to invade Taiwan.

"We are there in numbers, we're trained, we're ready and we're very powerful," Rear Adm. Timothy J. Keating, commander of the USS Kitty Hawk battle group, said after a military exercise in Southeast Asia. "China will know if they attempt to undertake any kind of operation - whether it's Taiwan or anything else - that they are going to have the U.S. Navy to deal with."

For its part, China has been trying to sound out the possible U.S. response to any military action against Taiwan, according to Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center in Washington.

Chinese officials have been making the rounds to U.S. experts on China, Paal said, adding: "They put it to me very bluntly: `Are you ready to go to war over Taiwan?' "

Beijing and Washington hoped for a thaw after declaring a "strategic partnership" during Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States in October 1997. President Clinton visited China the following June, but the veneer of friendliness remains thin.

"We really can't consider China and the United States as true friends," Wang Baoqing, a researcher at the Strategic Studies Division of the Military Science College, said in an interview with the state-run Guangming Daily. "America's strategic aim is to switch its focus from Europe to Asia. We should beware."

Beijing was outraged when Taiwan's president last month demanded equal status in negotiations with China. Beijing claimed that was a step toward declaring formal independence, ending the jointly held doctrine that Taiwan and the mainland are one country.

Beijing was angered anew when Washington, which is obligated by U.S. law to defend Taiwan, announced a sale of warplanes to Taiwan.

For its part, Taiwan described incursions by Chinese military jets into its airspace this week as "accidents," not deliberate provocations.